WDL is a collaborative transdisciplinary blog about the impact of digital technologies upon writing and lived experience. We talk about writing and reading in the context of 'new and old' media, transliteracy, craft, art, process and practice, social networks, cooperation and collaboration, narrative and memory, human computer interaction, imagination, nature, mind, body, and spirit.
Today is World Book Day, designated by UNESCO as a worldwide celebration of books and reading, The trouble is, the literature around it assumes that books are the only way to read.
I think it's time for World Not-Book Day, celebrating the many and varied ways of reading and writing which are not dependent upon paper books and the print publishing industry. Is it a good idea? What would you include?
Last week the Transcriptions team at UCSB launched the Agrippa Files website. It's a fascinating collection of multimedia materials about Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) which appeared in 1992 as a collaboration between artist Dennis Ashbaugh, author William Gibson, and publisher Kevin Begos, Jr.
Alan Liu writes that it is "a scholarly site that presents selected pages from the original art book (with the permission of the publisher); a unique archive of materials dating from the book's creation and early reception; a simulation of what the book's intended "fading images" might have looked like; a video of the 1992 "transmission" of the work; a "virtual lightbox" for comparing and studying pages from the book; commentary by the book's publisher and scholars; an annotated bibliography of scholarship, press coverage, interviews, and other material; a detailed bibliographic description of the book; and a discussion forum."
It's an absorbing collection for anyone seeking to understand and enjoy the multiplicity of contemporary new media texts.
My recent article, reproduced here by arrangement with the THES. Responses welcome.
To become transliterate, publishers need to start a dialogue with e-learners, Sue Thomas says
Transliteracy. It's another of those new usages for old concepts. It was originally applied to the mapping of one system of writing on to another, and the idea is now being extended to the digital realm. Today it refers to literacy across several media, which means, perhaps, that the more media you can use fluently, the more transliterate you are. How will that affect those of us who write, teach and publish? Can an understanding of transliteracy help dispel those rising levels of anxiety about the world of the web that, to paraphrase Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is "so new that some things still lack names"?
Continue reading "_Del.icio.us way to talk_ Times Higher Education Supplement, 28 October 2005" »
I'm giving a talk at the Café Scientifique in Leicester, UK, on Tuesday 8th November, at 7.30pm. Please do come along. I'll be talking about transliteracy, blogging, Web 2.0, and my book Hello World. More information at http://www.cafescientifiqueleicester.com/ Hope to see you there.
I've written a piece for the THES about transliteracy and about how collaborations between e-publishing and e-learning could produce wonderful things. The full piece is here. (Subscription is required but you can get a free trial.) If anyone has examples of this type of collaboration in action, please let me know. I'd be very interested to hear about them.
ps: the link at the bottom of the article is wrong., It should be http://www.mti.dmu.ac.uk/~sthomas/
I posted this on my blog yesterday but thought I'd add it here as it seems to fit with the current blogussions:
Right. So what are we doing about this? Well for one UNESCO has launched a Literacy Initiative for Empowerment (LIFE) while others are developing country/province specific initiatives. In other words the world has recognised the extreme importance of being able to read and write. Literacy is an indispensable prerequisite to gain access to information about health, environment, education and employment.
ENTER TECHNOLOGY. With almost everything existing online (banks, clothing, food, shelter - buying and letting, friends, family,etc...) one must be technologically literate. Without this new literacy there is no access to this world. In Professor Sue Thomas's talk (yesterday at DMU) she discussed the (alarming for some) speed at which web technology is progressing. Unfortunately, although technologies are converging at breakneck pace, research about them has not followed suit. Universities and some (can we say most?) academics seem to "fear" the progress of the internet. Perhaps they are worried that what is available is not academic...but that of course is the case for print as well. Good researchers recognise academic sources whether they exist online or offline. Perhaps the problem with the web (at least the new web, web 2.0) are the myriad of connections which abound. So universities retreat into what Thomas calls "gated communities;" communities where academics might feel protected from the wilderness but isn't collaboration and aren't connections central to any strong research? The question becomes how to "manage" the information (overload) which exists in the ether. There are all sorts of platforms and tagging devices but I think it comes down to each person being aware of what they want (subjective view, social view, academic view) and looking for sources which provide that.
If universities don't get involved now we'll have what Epic depicts - an internet where there is no "truth" to be found as newspapers have gone "offline" in protest and blogs become the news and, on top of it, each "news" story is tailored to each individual reader so the question of what really happened becomes impossible to answer. With universities not afraid to add to the "stone soup" of power and potential that is inherent in such a connective tissue the key words for information management will become "filtering," "ordering," and "delivering." In one word: we all need to be transliterate.
Dion Hinchcliffe writes about "J. LeRoy's recent observation that Web 2.0 will finally kill the concept of cyberspace as a viable ongoing concern." And, he goes on,
...he's probably right.
One of the key aspects of Web 2.0 is that it connects people so they can effortlessly participate in fluid conversations and dynamic information sharing. At the same time, computing devices are giving people permapresence on the Web through PDAs, phones, digital cameras, and a slew of other emerging devices.
Before now, you had to consciously go to cyberspace by sitting at a PC and looking at it through a window, in essence going to a place where you primarily observed and gathered knowledge. Not any more.
These days the boundaries between reality and cyberspace are becoming increasingly blurred and the activities on the Web are becoming more two way and integrated with reality, with the canonical example being the hypothetical Taxi button on a cellphone. With going into cyberspace no longer being a discrete step (folks are more and more always there now) and with the primary activity often being to interact with other folks transparently, and you have a folding of cyberspace so severe that it just disappears into the ether.
This extrapolation makes a lot of sense. After all, we've been longing for that always-on portal without perhaps realising that once we are always on, we are at the same time giving up the frisson of that step he describes. However much I want it to happen, I will also mourn that loss, just as I still mourn the sound of the dial-up modem doing its musical hardware handshaking thing down the phone line.
Are we really coming close to attending the funeral of cyberspace? I hardly dare think it...
The whole post is well worth a read, and includes a useful diagram too.
In the next few weeks I'm giving three talks about transliteracy
and folksonomy - a seminar for my colleagues at De Montfort University,
a paper at Interfaces: English Studies and the Computer, Newcastle, 3/4 November, and a talk at the Leicester Cafe Scientifique, 8 November.
However,
I'm getting a little worried because as part of my talk I want to give
a simple visual guide to how social tagging works, and what I'd really
like is to be able to show a nice plain diagram. However, I've hunted
around and can't find anything like that, which seems rather odd.
Surely someone somewhere has produced something like this? I'd much
appreciate recommendations from anyone who knows of such a diagram.
(first posted at Hello World)
A rather hefty title for a heavy subject, but one which affects us all. Danah Boyd has written an enlightening articulation of what is in store for us with Web2.0. She says:
Web2.0 is about glocalization, it is about making global information available to local social contexts and giving people the flexibility to find, organize, share and create information in a locally meaningful fashion that is globally accessible.
What will this mean for the way we conceptualise and write about/in that web? The very first question that comes to my mind is that in order to be included in the larger discussion via tags (like the one I have added to this article so it is picked up by Technorati) we have to spell glocalization with a z (US English) and not an s (UK English) so for me as a native UK writer, there is an immediate and obvious problem of US language colonialism in the very notion of glocalis/zation, and one which will not be obvious to American and other non-UK readers. This is, of course, hugely ironic! But it also is inevitable, and simply means that we need more intelligent tagging systems which can tag across diverse languages. No doubt someone somewhere is developing that as we speak, I hope.
(On a lighter note, having to spell the word with a z (zed, zee) reminds me of being in America and having to pronounce banAAAna as baNANa in order to be understood, something which feels indescribably odd in the mouth, as does calling people 'Sir', a mode of address which, for good or ill, we never use in the UK. I love all these differences but am also very sensitive to them.)
But I'm going to leave that aside in this post, and simply encourage you to read Danah Boyd's analysis and think about what this means in relation to language and transliteracy. It's extremely interesting. Why Web2.0 matters: preparing for glocalization.
Technorati tag: Glocalization
This is a good example of the kind of activity where I think the visual may supersede text. This article is about using your phone to remember items which in the past you may either have written down, or simply stored in your brain. The author also asks for ideas from others so it's worth keeping an eye on the comments section of this post too. Here are some of the examples given:
Remember where you parked - In a parking lot or garage, snap a photo of the section where you’ve parked. If you’re parked on the street in a strange neighborhood, grab a picture of an address, a landmark, or of the signs for the cross street.
“Wishlist” items you might want to buy later - If
you’re out and about and happen to see a CD, book, or other consumable
you might want to pick up later on, snap a photo of the item’s barcode.
When you get home you can look the item up on Amazon or Froogle.com and
find the best price, or just add it to your canonical online wishlist.
Show people where you’ve put things - If
you’ve moved the mayonnaise jar with little Tyler’s college money or
relocated the good scissors to your work bench, snap a photo and mail
it to your housemates.
Record the hours of a new store - New dry cleaner or Thai restaurant you want to try? Grab a photo of the hours.
Read (snap?) the whole thing at 43 Folders
At the DRH conference yesterday we heard a paper from William Kilbride, Assistant Director of the AHDS Archaeology Data Service at the University of York. His talk was called 'How to become illiterate' and made a simple but thought-provoking point. He is a specialist on the laity and the clergy in the Anglo-Saxon period and he is also very knowledgeable about the internet - he set up the first British online archaeology project in 1994.
The Anglo-Saxon period, he told us, saw the rise of clerical literacy - increasing numbers of monks and nuns learned to read and write. The result of this, he claimed, was the invention of lay illiteracy.
An interesting point. In a society where nobody could read or write, illiteracy was not a mark of inferiority. But in a society where *some* people can read and write, with all the advantages such expertise naturally brings, illiteracy suddenly is an issue.
He further pointed out that even when everyone can read and write, what they consume then falls under scrutiny, so that we see sanctioned and acceptable kinds of literacy, and unsanctioned unacceptable kinds of literacy. An obvious example might be, say, the difference between a consumer of a broad range of literatures and one who only reads Hello magazine.
His point was that today, now that technology has become part of social practice, the notion of lay illiteracy has been re-invented, only this time the literate theocracy are people like us, the readers and writers of this blog, and the illiterates are those who cannot keep up with, or have access to, such technology.
Further, one might say that even within those who are all able to read and write online there still remain sanctioned and unsanctioned levels of technological literacy. (I would be interested to hear views on what these could be.)
His message was addressed, not to the whole world, but to the Humanities academic community, and expressed his frustration with the reluctance of many Humanities scholars to engage with technology, but it is pertinent to the wider community too. Finally, he addressed the title of his paper.
'How to become illiterate'? Simple, he said. Don't do anything. Don't find out how to use the web, don't learn about blogs and wikis, don't try to understand search engines etc etc. Don't do anything, and you too will be on a par with the laity in Anglo-Saxon England who were unable to read and write - you will be functionally illiterate in a technological world.
ps:
Some of us staying on campus here in John Creed hall are experiencing odd dreams, rattling door handles, and a locked door that has no lock. We're beginning to wonder whether the building is haunted... yet another kind of transliteracy...
